Happy Holidays!
Brad and I are spending a quiet weekend at home, enjoying more baked goods than usual. Actually it’s not that quiet—Brad is recording music on the Steinway grand, seasoned with the background sounds of me banging around in the kitchen.
We’ve got a fresh-baked visionary pie for you today.
Some of you know that Brad’s grandfather was a country preacher. His name was Reverend W.L. Keeney, and Brad called him Pa Pa. Brad’s grandmother was an equally devout woman named Virginia Keeney, and was the most popular Sunday School teacher in their church. Everyone in the family called her Doe (like a gentle deer). Brad’s grandparents were loving, wise, nurturing, holy, and steadfast. Many of the healers and shamans Brad met around the world saw and felt his grandparents around him—they could tell they had strong ropes to God. Brad dreams of Pa Pa and Doe a lot, and this Guild season, Doe has been on the visionary telephone line almost nonstop, bringing us gifts like the one below.
Brad went to sleep praying strongly for everyone in the Sacred Ecstatics Guild. The next morning, I heard him stirring about at 5:45am. Brad said to me, weeping, "Sorry to wake you. I had a big dream. Something big came down." I knew it was worth losing out on my last fifteen minutes of sleep to find out what it was. I love nothing more than waking up to discover that Brad has received a big dream.
Here is the report:
The whole Guild was sitting in a circle. I sat next to Brad on his right, and Brad’s mother sat to the right of me. To Brad’s left was his grandmother, Doe. She was smiling, and we immediately knew that this was a very important gathering of the Sacred Ecstatics Guild. The presence of Doe changed the atmosphere of the room. Our attention turned toward serious matters of life and death.
Brad began talking about the history of modern medicine, remarking that it is a very young field when compared to other kinds of healing that have been practiced around the world for centuries. He mentioned having seen a horse and buggy doctor as a child.
Then Brad asked Doe an unusual question, “Doe, please tell us about the first hospital you remember seeing.” Before she could speak another word, a miraculous event took place in the room. A floating, three-dimensional color image of a beautiful heart appeared in front of her chest. Everyone’s eyes were now transfixed on this miracle. Doe continued to describe the first hospital she remembered. Quietly, she spoke, “This heart in Thee I do suffer.” Brad asked her to repeat those words to make sure we all heard them. “This heart in Thee I do suffer.” Her words pierced everyone in the room. Some Guild members burst into tears and other passed out from emotion and collapsed to the ground.
Then Doe said, “I gave my heart to Jesus long ago. He is always by my side and to him I turn for my every need, including help with bearing my sorrow and suffering.”
Jesus was more than Doe’s doctor. His heart was her first hospital, and her heart lived inside it.
Then in the dream, a woman from the Guild came forward for a healing and sat right in front of Brad’s grandmother. Doe then enacted one of the oldest forms of doctoring, much older than modern medicine. Like a Kalahari grandmother shaman, she placed the woman’s finger in her mouth and sucked on it to “straighten her nail.”
In the Kalahari, “nails” or “thorns” are metaphors for the concentrated, compressed drops of love-charged life force that live inside us. This force or power is called “n/om.” Nails come from the Big God or Sky God, but also can be given to us from strong healers.
Anger, selfishness, jealousy, and the stress of everyday living can make our nails rusty, dirty, or bent. When that happens, we get sick or out of whack. That’s when we need doctors trained in God’s Heart Hospital to pull the old nails out and give us shiny new straight ones. Then voilà! All better.
At first in the dream, Brad did not catch the holiness of Doe’s action, even though he has danced and exchanged nails with Kalahari healers for decades. It just felt strange to him, like Doe was giving an embarrassing kind of manicure. According to Brad, he also missed the “cure” part of the word “manicure”—the actual word he said to himself in the vision. It held a “cure” for any man embarrassed to clean nails in a spiritual manner.
Here is an image of Brad’s friend, a very strong doctor in the Kalahari named Motaope. He is showing Brad how to suck the sickness out of a person:
If you haven’t caught on yet how the heart, the hospital, Jesus, and Kalahari nail cleaning are connected, let me spell it out for you: Jesus was a big-hearted love carpenter who knew how to handle nails, which means he was a Bushman doctor in the original sense. The heart of Eland Jesus, as we call him in the Guild, was pierced by many love thorns from the Big God. As his heart grew softer with every pierce, the stronger his healing power became. From this heart flows a healing stream, an electrical beam of super-charged love, the oldest medicine on earth.
Grandmother Doe loved to make her grandchildren laugh, and she ate a slice of pie every night of her life. Now she is inviting us to enter This Heart, to bring all our suffering and sorrow to its hospital to be doctored, grandparented, and renewed.
This heart in Thee I do suffer.
This heart in Thee I do live.
This heart in Thee I do straighten all the nails of the world.
Thank you Eland Jesus, Pa Pa, Doe, Motaope, Brad, and all the saints, doctors, and grandparents who have helped soften me enough to come home to This Heart and receive its healing nails and thorns of unconditional comfort and joy.
Merry Christmas! May there be peace on earth and goodwill toward all.
-Hillary and Brad.
Note: when I'm banging around in the kitchen it is most certainly not the sound of me baking, which I now realize the first paragraph implies :) The cooking I enjoy, but the baking I leave to Levee Bakery here in New Orleans.
Love